Page:A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India Vol 1.djvu/129

Rh and till this is done all that can be said is, that very numerous divergences exist, and several striking local peculiarities are known to be current, concerning which we await further information. Even in Calcutta till quite recent times people spoke in twenty different ways, and no one was sure which was the correct way.

On reviewing the whole question of Indian dialects, several important points attract attention. The first is, that as each of the seven languages, except Oṛiya, possesses many dialects, and as none of them until recent times and the rise of literature had any central type or standard, each one of the dialects into which it is divided has as much right as any of the others to be considered a genuine Aryan form of speech, and any one of them might have been chosen, as one of them actually was, as the basis on which to found the central type. Further, as some of the dialects spoken on the frontier between two languages partake almost equally of the characteristics of both, so that the various languages melt gradually one into another, without any of that harshness or confusion which marks those countries where two heterogeneous languages come into contact, we are justified in pointing to a time when there was no such distinct demarcation between the various languages as we see at present. We thus can raise for ourselves a picture of a bygone age, in which all the Aryans of India spoke what may be fairly called one language, though in many diverse forms, πολλῶν ὀνομάτων μορφὴ μία; and can see that the so-called seven languages of modern India have arisen from a process of crystallization, so to speak, the atoms consisting of the various dialects having been attracted to and grouped themselves round seven principal points or heads. The intrinsic and essential unity of the whole Aryan family in India thus becomes a natural result of the researches of philology, as it does of those of history.

Secondly, inasmuch as until the rise of literature no one of